6 Answers
6

As you possibly already realized, tmux version 1.8 is too new. As of writing this answer, version 1.8 is only 19 hours old.

There is indeed an official PPA for tmux, but don't expect new version to appear there instantly. It might take hours, days, and even weeks, and it's totally up to PPA maintainer.

If you for some reason need a newest version, then you might download the code and build/install tmux by yourself. Should not be a big deal, since tmux has dependencies only on libevent and ncurses packages, and both of these packages are present on most if not all of Linux distros. Just download the latest code, and type following via terminal:

Those packages are not quite mentioned on tmux homepage. You have to know Linux to figure you need the '-dev' packages, and there's no indication as to whether you need libevent1 or 2.
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Jonathan HartleyNov 2 '13 at 15:51

I have not found an "official" PPA for new tmux packages. However a PPA search on launchpad turns up quite a few options.

Many are out of date, but I found a ppa by pi-rho that has current tmux and tmux-next packages for 12.04, 12.10 and 13.04. (At the time of this answer they are at versions 1.8-1ubuntu1~ppa2 and 1.9~20130425~bzr3062+9-1ubuntu1~ppa0). There is no guarantee that that PPA will continue to be maintained up-to-date, but for now it seems like a fair option.

Be aware that it also has a number of other packages in it. If you add this PPA you will find the other packages also get upgraded unless you do some sort of apt pin config.

In order to run tmuxinator on Ubuntu Precise (12.04), I needed tmux v1.8+, which is available in Saucy now and therefore in the "backports" repository for Precise. Here's how I got it:

Per UbuntuBackports, edit /etc/apt/sources.list to enable the "precise-backports" repositories (around line 45).

Update your repository cache with sudo apt-get update

Per different instructions, install the backported version (1.8) with sudo apt-get install -t precise-backports tmux. I couldn't get apt-get install tmux/precise-backports to work for me.

Confirm the installed version with tmux -V

Happy tmuxing!

Note you'll have to kill all sessions and start with fresh ones, otherwise you'll get a server-client version mismatch error, and other users logged in on the same server may be running tmux, which will keep the server process alive until everyone exits. Look for zombies, too (ps aux | grep tmux).